5 Sex Comedy Tropes That Need to Evolve or Die

I grew up watching sexuality comedies because my parents were the kinds of people who felt their preteen should get to know why the shitty dean of a college was ruining everyone’s horny day. Fast-forward a few years, and I noticed that all modern movie deans seem to hate boners too. Basically, sexuality slapsticks haven’t truly changed a lot in the past 30 years, and that is definitely for the worse. These cinemas urgently need to evolve past their standard material, which is at best age-old and at the worst vengefully inappropriate in real life.

5

Peeping As A Wacky Prank

In a curious breach from reality, spying on someone who is naked in a movie is nearly always presented as hilarious good fun. If your landlord was watching you rain, you’d likely be upset. But if the gang from American Pie is watching two women get undressed, it’s a goddamn party. Let’s see how those crazy children mess this up!

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The “spying on women get naked” trope is about as age-old as nudity. It was such a big part of the movie Porky’s way back in 1981( right after the Civil War) that they used an eye peeping through a hole as part of the poster artwork. If you need a reminder, that specific thing is also a big part of the movie Psycho. A good rule of thumb when it comes to interactions with women: Don’t do anything that a serial killer who garments like his mother would do.

Yet this same gag happens in literally three different American Pie movies, and maybe more, since I don’t even think the company behind the American Pie movies knows how many exist at this phase. You can also find it in The Girl Next Door, Hall Pass, I Love You Beth Cooper, and countless direct-to-video liberates intended to build teenage boys laugh while jerking off. And it’s so bizarre, because in any of those, just changing the score to horror movie tension music would turn the scene into nightmare fuel.

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And every time, the woman’s torso is just a prop — the degree of the joke is the peepers’ hilarious bumble. The comedic tension comes from the threat of them being caught. In one of the American Pie s, Jim defines up his camera so his pals can watch him debauch the unsuspecting foreign exchange student, but the dullard accidentally emails the links to the whole school and Blink-1 82( plus a monkey ). What a silly goof! His small crime turned into a much larger misdemeanour because of his ineptitude, and an unsuspecting woman has now been embarrassed in front of thousands of her peers. Where’s that “wah wah” horn when you need it?

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Other “Sexy” Pranks

The sex prank is a lot of good-natured joking, if you deem things that are blatantly illegal and even more blatantly gross good-natured. How would you feel right now if someone transgressed into your house to steal your lingerie, then jammed their dick through a pit next to you while you rained, then awaited until you were at a school dance and ripped your clothes off while other half-naked people chased you? Fun, huh? The sexuality prank basically asks what would humiliate someone most, and then adds a penis to it. And slapstick has loved it for years.

Hell, if you grew up on ‘8 0s comedies, you were probably convinced that half of all sexuality was sexy pranks. The panty raid in Revenge Of The Nerds, the dick in the wall from Porky’s , the “Scott Baio use his creepy powers to strip everyone naked and instigate a bizarre mass sexual assault party” from Zapped. 20 years later, we had Van Wilder filling pastry with dog semen and feeding it to unsuspecting frat guys. And in American Reunion, Stifler extol himself a Vagina Shark before diving below the water and fondling a random group of teenage girls.

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On some level, we like the idea of sex grossness in a comedic context. Hell, that’s how half of the articles I write operate. Sex is still a very taboo topic for the most proportion, so when we watch outrageous sexuality in some manner, it gets a big reaction. But if you step outside the slapstick universe and into the real one, that whole dog jizz thing is frightening. That’s shit that would put you in therapy for years , not to mention putting members of the public who perpetrated the prank in prison for the offences of, in legal terms, “being an absolute fuckin’ creep.”

But most of the time, these things are done by the protagonists. We in the audience are rooting for the prank, because the victims, uh, deserve a sex crime because they’re jerks? That kind of seems like a bad lesson to send.

3

A Lady Is A Prize

About 30 years ago, John Hughes moved balls to the wall with the teen genre and stimulated Weird Science, a movie about two teenage boys who literally create their own magical sexuality slave with the omnipotent power of ‘8 0s computers. Flip to 2018, and while no one has actually made a lady from scratch on film lately( aside from the odd robot ), women are still more or less the objects of mystical boner quests for male protagonists. And rarely does anyone give a handful of happy horseshit if she’s interested, cares, or even has a name.

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Now, before anyone gets their ball container in a knot, remember: This is me. I’m the guy who introduced a generation to the Baby Jesus Buttplug. I’m not opposed to any number of debaucheries. But I’m simply seeming like maybe comedy needs to evolve past the time of making a woman with personal computers that had a 64 kb hard drive.

The general level behind films like Superbad, most of the American Pie series, Wedding Crashers, The 40 -Year-Old Virgin, and so many others is that pursuit of the status of women. Booty is the Mount Doom into which the male protagonist wants to throw the One Wiener. But Mount Doom wasn’t particularly important to the plot, and neither are the women in most sexuality comedies. Superbad and 40 -Year-Old Virgin flesh the dames out verrrrrry somewhat, but that nearly feels like kind of a nod from the filmmakers, acknowledging that they’ve done a disservice to the female characters. But it doesn’t make up for actually generating complicated female characters. Like James Franco wearing a “Me Too” pin, there’s a stair that’s been missed in the chain of understanding.

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Obviously , not every movie follows this template. There are female-led slapsticks like Rough Night and Bad Moms, which sort of overrule the template, but they’re not the norm. The norm is a movie like Van Wilder, wherein the Taj character doesn’t even crave a particular woman in the end. He only craves a lady. Not even a woman, really, but a happy-go-lucky vagina, and he says just as much. Sex slapsticks don’t all necessity ten-minute scenes in which the male characters stand in a circle and say their favorite things about females. But they do require female characters who are more than just penis homes for the dudes to move into at the end.

2

Female Sex Fiends

You’ll read the female sexuality fiend, the monstrously horny lady that will tear apart the movie in a Godzilla-like rage until she gets that dick, in a lot of comedies — Get Him To The Greek, Wedding Crashers , 40 -Year-Old Virgin , American Pie .( AGAIN. Is this series going to hit every one of these bases ?) If the writers are nervous that the protagonist is too much of a pig, they throw in a dame sex fiend to balance them out. Remember when Michelle in American Pie spouts her famous “flute in the pussy” line? That’s a primo example. “Oh my God, this unassuming daughter is actually even more of a sex freak than our hero! Dames are pervs too! Karma worked out in the end! ” But did it?

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The lady sex freak is often a very weird character. Jim doesn’t even crave Michelle in American Pie ; he decides on her when he can’t get the girl he does crave, and then suddenly she’s putting musical instruments in his butt. But he never considered her at first, and “theres only” after he found out she was as much of a deviant as him that he was into it. Isla Fisher in Wedding Crashers is much the same way — Vince Vaughn schemes on using her, then she gets weird and clingy and sexually aggressive. Of course, they end up together, because her open sexuality altogether balances out the fact that he makes a living pathologically lying to any women in a ten-foot radius.

The female sex fiend serves as a kind of karmic sex retribution for the man, working on the “two wrongs make a right” principle. In Get Him To The Greek , Carla Gallo’s character is in the film for all of five minutes, just long enough to literally jam something up Jonah Hill’s ass. This is akin to how Michelle stays a trumpet up Jim’s ass in American Pie or how Jennifer Aniston runs Jason Bateman’s ass in Horrible Bosses 2. You can really zing a dude by putting things up his ass, apparently.

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It’s clearly a technique of having a character get what’s coming to them. After being callous or some kind of manwhore, they get their comeuppance. But they don’t learn anything, genuinely, or change in any positive style. It only builds you feel better about them being the “hero” of the movie, because it keeps them humble in an anally violating sort of way.

1

MILFs

I would argue that the only reason any of us today know the word MILF is because of, let me check here, American Pie .( I guess this whole listing could have been just that dealership .) It’s been a million other places since then, from coffee cups to T-shirts, and is a sprawling genre of porn. So good for Stifler and his mama, as they changed the culture landscape, or at least the boner landscape.

Far be it from me to deny anyone’s advises to F someone’s MIL, as the world is up to its nuts in lovely mothers. But the trope in movies has always been various kinds of creepy, due to the weird, unspoken doubled standard. Deem how often an older leading man is paired with a younger leading woman — Tom Cruise was 22 years younger than his Mummy co-star, 20 years older than his Jack Reacher co-star, and 21 years older than his Edge Of Tomorrow co-star. Basically, Cruise needs two decades on a woman for them to work together, and it’s never even a plot phase. Nobody considers it freaky. There’s a reason there’s no Cruise genre of porn. I signify, I don’t think there is.

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So right away, when a woman is significantly older than the man/ boy, it’s a big deal in a movie. And you can see this trope all over the place, from Behaving Badly, in which Elizabeth Shue plays a mom who sleeps with a teen son, to a movie that’s actually called MILF , about a group of guys who have shitty luck with girls their own age, to Adam Sandler’s That’s My Boy, where the entire comedic setup for this movie is how hilarious statutory rape is.

And at the heart of all of it is that a “MILF” is either supposed to be shocking( “She’s sexy … but also 40 ! “) or a straight fetish. Seem at the acronym, for God’s sake. They want to fuck a mama , not a woman who happens to also be a momma. And that’s genuinely shitty, isn’t it? You’re inducing someone a Fleshlight of a certain age. Don’t get me wrong, they can still fill their movies with sexually active middle-aged wives. But maybe stop feigning that idea is automatically hilarious instead of simply, you know, a real thing that exists.